Jon Thompson’s Landscape with Light (Shearsman Books)

This is a remarkable collection of poems and I recommend all our readers to order a copy immediately from Tony Frazer in the hope that it may arrive for the New Year. In moments of Spicerian click and snap the word happens and a reader ‘would not choose to blink and go blind /After the instant’. The camera’s focus is on landscapes of mood, cinematic realisations, and the results are some of the most rewarding and accurate film criticism I have read.
‘Fragment of an Unpublished Memoir by a Cinematographer’s Assistant’ gives us a glimpse of that landscape of the Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2007 film of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country For Old Men:

“…the riches of the world receding.
The desert was a landscape of mutability in a world of
immutability…”

Those receding riches do not merely refer to chance wealth acquired by a man who stumbles upon a drug exchange gone wrong but also include that throaty voice-over of the sheriff talking about ‘past-times’ and comparisons with the ‘oldtimers’. Within the eleven lines of the poem we hear that same nostalgic quietness in ‘I remember’ and ‘Mostly, I remember / the wide-open emptiness’.

With a similar sense of acute observation incorporating comment the Coen’s Fargo is presented to us initially as ‘Desire’:

In the flat uninhabited spaces, snow falls from an empty
sky. Here and there, the bare branches of an oak are
black against the steadily-falling flakes.

This blanketing of snow ‘accumulates like / loneliness’ with one snowfall ‘covering the last one, layering into / snowdrifts that become the landscape’. The plaintive musical score by Carter Burwell echoes behind Thompson’s lines as we recognise that everyone is ‘forced to forge new paths of exile through an unknown land.’

Walter Hill’s 1979 film of The Warriors is caught by the poet as we glimpse the ‘wheel purple against / the nothingness / behind it’ and yet feel the ‘awful urgency’ of that pace as the gangs of the city converge upon Pelham Bay Park.

Martin Scorsese’s Travis Bickle is the taxi-driver from the 1976 film whose monotony can be heard behind the lines

The days go on & on.
Night goes on & on.

Red neon signs
shimmer on wet streets.

Nightmare and surreal fantasy merge with the urban glare as you look in the film’s closing scene to see ‘your face with someone else’s eyes / in the mirror’.

As a last example of this tour-de-force of language moving at the speed of film we confront a whiteness different from that of the opening sequence of Fargo: a whiteness which is the ‘administration of days / which / will not suffer a whit of deviation / or allow more than a rectangle of sky’. This is the medication-time horror of Big Nurse’s ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

When I first started reading this book of poems I kept thinking of another book which hovered on the edge of my mind, just out of reach of both hand and eye. I now remember it: Jorge Luis Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy with its starkly evocative landscape acting as a backdrop to ‘The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan’:

An image of the desert wilds of Arizona, first and foremost, an image of the desert wilds of Arizona and New Mexico—a country famous for its silver and gold camps, a country of breathtaking open spaces, a country of monumental mesas and soft colours, a country of bleached skeletons picked clean by buzzards.